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Abstract

This dissertation is an anaiysis of Trent 91, one of the series of
fifteenth-century musical manuscripts known collectively as the Trent Codices.
Trent 91 contains a large repertory of sacred music, most of it anonymously and
uniquely preserved. The following study defines, for the first time, that
repertory’s pivotal place in the larger context of musical developments during
the Renaissance. The first chapter, which centers on an extended account of
Trent 91’s physical formation, challenges seme widely accepted hypotheses
concerning the genesis of Trent 91. While for many years scholars have viewed
the later portions of the Trent collection as the work of a single scribe,
Johannes Wiser, active in Trento itself from about 1455 to 1465, both the
configuration and the contents of these manuscripts, including Trent 91, can be
more coherently explained by analyzing them as the joint creations of a number
of scribes working somewhat later (through most of the 1470s) and with ready
access to a flourishing musical life at the Imperial Court at Wiener Neustadt,
near Vienna. Specific support for this theory, set forward in Chapter Two, is to
be found in the anonymous plainchant paraphrase compositions in Trent 91. Like
Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus from several decades later, these pieces use chant
melodies and liturgical orders appropriate for the Diocese of Passau, and so may
be from the Imperial Chapel at Wiener Neustadt, which lay within that Diocese’s
jurisdiction. Chapter Three next turns to the repertory contained in the first
four fascicles of the manuscript. A close examination of the relations between
Trent 91’s readings of some of these works and their concordances in other
manuscripts suggests, together with physical features of the copies themselves,
that this first portion of Trent 91 may have entered the collection through the
agency, direct or indirect, of the Flemish composer Johannes Martini, whose
Missa Cucu heads this portion of the manuscript. The remaining two chapters
cover a series of Mass Ordinary cycles previously considered to be, like the
repertory of the first four fascicles, imported from Franco-Flemish circles.
Both argue instead that these Masses, which represent two distinctive traditions
of Mass composition, come instead from the circle of composers resident at the
Imperial Court in Wiener Neustadt – chief among them Johannes Touront, whose
work is known almost exclusively in manuscripts from Imperial territory. A
concluding section assesses the possible impact of these Mass genres on Martini,
who may have spent several years in or near the Imperial Court circle. Through
Martini’s later activities in Ferrara, these developments in supposedly
provincial Austria may have come to influence a new generation of composers,
such as Obrecht and Josquin, working in France and Italy.